Muriel Cayet was born in 1961 near Paris. A mediator and writer for fifteen years, but also literary adviser and training facilitator, this art-therapist has specialized in the story of life. Story of life as a tool of change of one’s relation to the other, of one’s vision of self, but also as a tool of personal development.
Colorist painter artist, today she lives in Mareuil sur Arnon (Cher region [Department of Cher] in France). One could describe the artist as a “travel companion” because art-therapy is an act of accompanying creation. “To paint is to create oneself,” she said in an interview speaking of the act of painting, of creating. The absence of premeditation in one’s creative act allows one to think that there is a vital need behind it. Not only as regards painting but also for writing.
It is an immediate need to satisfy. Actually, it is in this way that the artist perceives her act of faith through art. When she speaks of art, she tells us: “from the blank canvas to the final work, the most profound thoughts, knots, blocks, desires take shape, go back to a form of vivid memory which is expressed by the brush, notes, writing, or by movements of the body, but transformed, sublimated or even distant.” She sends us back to the awareness of self, of our limitations, of our faults, of the very structure of ourselves more or less marked by the life that we serve as a vehicle for, through the experience of the ages and through art, whether it be painted or written. “Creation, whatever it may be, makes it possible to give a meaning to life and (…) a meaning to death … which has meaning only if it does not represent an absolute end, but a cessation of existence; remembrance, memory, works of art will remain.”
Muriel Cayet, impassioned by creation and by life, is also a great philosopher. Furthermore, she admits to being filled with wonder at a mere nothing. She transforms everything into action, emotion, impulse, life’s energy. In 2009, she was named “Consulting Academician” to the International Academy of Fine Arts of Quebec. She has been recognized as an art expert by her peers.

Muriel Cayet, to say as some do that she is multidisciplinary because she is professionalized in various techniques of expression such as literature, painting, teaching or even art therapy, that comes from a mind with drawers that is not in the reality of its mental thinking.

It is true that implicates me in an analysis that is my own, but that I hope, she will say, will be as close as possible to the management of the world that is hers.

To paint, is it not to write, to write with a style appropriate to an expression used by the great colorists which makes it possible to complement conventional writing making possible an imaginary other. Or else to write is to offer to painting directions of reading otherwise expressed, thus offering in the reading of a canvas, sensitivities to which our own culture does not allow us to have access to.

And then to teach or perhaps to guide in the range of hearing and understanding of the listener so that he can draw from the various directions his own space and the coherence of an expression which artistically becomes his identity.

Is this not to write in dialogue form, is this not to express oneself in the same language, to speak in understood idioms. Muriel Cayet is not, in my thoughts, this academic intellectual, which she nevertheless is, but a cerebral artist, an artist in the most precise definition of the term. She is part of a world that is for most of us either inaccessible, or that can seem bewildering, as the reference points for integration into our societies have forged for us a sometimes too rational mind, overshadowing the same components and values which up to the point of self-censorship, make us believe that art is metrical, constructed, defined and in its place when in fact it is in art that our mind is constructed, and here in paintings that I feel are instinctive. This, I have read in the works of Muriel, but this instinctive world in which I have believed to have found her, is it indeed the space in which she resonates?

Finally, if I were permitted to go astray, she has known how to captivate me, she has known how to make it possible for me to look at myself, and to listen to myself. Indeed, art-therapy, painting, literature, in her are visceral, true, unique and weaken all the superlatives that could dare to impose inappropriate and more inadequate comparisons in the expression of her painting and her mind which tears the veil that the culture of the common vision imposes on us. For me, her painting requires an open mind, the active look and then you close your eyes. Thank you, Muriel, for having brought me so much, given so much and please believe that if today I have grown, it will leave an indelible mark in the long path of the definition of my Self.

Muriel, on behalf of everyone, thank you again for your being and for saying it so well.

Opening Speech of 7 April 2007 by Gerard Alexeef, Director of the Art and Culture Gallery in Saint-Marcel.